Assembly line worker fights to use medical marijuana on the job

Joshua Jacquot smokes a joint at his home in Windsor on Jan. 25, 2017. Jacquot is upset because his company won't permit him to smoke medical marijuana at work even though he has a prescription.Tyler Brownbridge / Windsor Star

Joshua Jacquot says his employer won’t allow him during working hours to take the medication he needs to cope with depression and anxiety because that medication is medical marijuana.

It’s doctor-prescribed and legal, and according to the 23-year-old assembly line worker, “it seems to be the only thing that works.”

But he said when he informed Ventra Assembly several months ago that he wanted to take it at work, he was told, “no,” to use regular prescribed drugs instead. He said he’s already tried them and they don’t help. He went off on sick leave in November, he said, and continues to fight, because he can’t use the medication he needs at work.

“I’m frustrated, I’m angry, I’m upset,” he said, insisting that if he’s allowed to use his weed, he won’t be high on the job.

He’d use a strain of medical marijuana with low levels of THC, the “psychoactive” compound in marijuana, and high levels of CBD, marijuana’s other active compound. And to comply with no-smoking legislation, he would take capsules or cannabis oil.

“They would allow me to have Percocets or Fentanyl (prescription opioids) at work, but they’re not going to allow me to have medical marijuana with high CBD,” said Jacquot.

“I’m not saying I want to smoke weed every five minutes, but I need it to deal with my depression, I want to be able to use it.”

Officials from the Lauzon Parkway company declined to comment on claims by Jacquot, who said he only began working there last year. For several years before that, he smoked weed recreationally and learned how much it helped with his depression and anxiety, he said.

His family doctor prescribed him medical marijuana last fall. Jacquot decided to “do the right thing” and tell his employer he would be taking it, he said, instead of keeping things discreet.

On Thursday, Jacquot was mulling making a complaint to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. A spokeswoman for the Human Rights Legal Support Centre, Jennifer Ramsay, said there’s been an increasing number of cases like Jacquot’s coming to human rights tribunals across the country as the use of medical marijuana becomes increasingly mainstream.

The province’s Human Rights Code requires that employers accommodate any medical treatment, “including the use of marijuana, that an individual requires in order to access services or to be a productive member of the workplace,” a recent Ontario Bar Association report on the issue says. It often comes down to a balance between the employee’s right to be accommodated and an employer’s obligation to ensure safety in the workplace.

Ramsay said an employer can’t make a blanket prohibition on what drugs an employee can take. At the same time, the employer can make the case that a worker who’s high at work would endanger himself and others.

“Even then, the employer would have to prove it is a matter of health and safety with evidence to back that up,” she said.

From a medical perspective, if a person needs to take a medication, the employer has to allow it, said Dr. Christopher Blue, a Windsor family physician who prescribes medical marijuana. But he added that doesn’t give an employee the right to be high at work.

“You can take your medication, but if it alters your judgment and alters your performance you shouldn’t be taking it at work,” said Blue, who believes that medical marijuana can be a better alternative in some cases to drugs such as opioids. But it still carries the social stigma that you’re taking it to get high.

“Why are opiates and Fentanyl and Oxycontins and all that stuff OK, but this stuff is not? There’s kind of a double standard there,” he said. He noted there are strains of marijuana that have no recreational benefit at all.

Megan McCrae, the marketing director of Leamington-based medical marijuana firm Aphria, said prescribing physicians can recommend their patients use certain strains that help with their particular symptoms without any psychoactive effect.

“There are strains that have next to no psychoactive effect whatsoever,” she said.

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